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Another Moth on the Barby

There is a Light Brown Apple Moth humping my shoulder. No, really, the little bugger just crawled right up there and started working away at my eloquent yellow Tommy Bahama shirt like Paris Hilton on a Saturday night. My first instinct…squash the little Aussie bastard and feed him to my python named Monty.A Female Caberet of Light Brown Apple Moths

However, now my under-developed Buddhist sympathy for all living creatures has kicked in at the last moment, and all I feel is remorse.

In the spring of 2007 the Australian-born Light Brown Apple Moth (Epiphyas postvittana) invaded the continental United States and Canada. Listed as a noxious insect by many agriculturists, the result were quarantines, bad mouthing, and finally the aerial spraying of a chemical romantically called Checkmate-OFM-F throughout the Monterey Peninsula in early September, right smack dab in the middle of their orgy season.

Female Light Brown Apple Moths excrete what we pesky humans like to romantically call a pheromone but which are of course actually two compounds, (E)-11-tetradedecen-1-yl acetate and (E,E)-9,11-tetradecadien-1-yl acetate. These luscious chemicals make up the entirety of the pheromone excreted by the female Apple Moth and acts like magical hump juice to male Apple Moths. It gets the little bastards savagely horny, helps them seek out the females for a good time, and if you’ve ever been a male or female scratching at the walls for a good time you can only guess at what other primal instincts the Apple Moth has banging against its skull due to this old cocktail of Love Potion #9.

Pesky Humans
So we sprayed the entire Monterey Peninsula with the compound CheckMate-OFM-F, a slightly toxic mixture of the very same acetates excreted by horny Apple Moth chicks everywhere. The 1,700 pounds of it covered cars, books, small children, and specifically my Tommy Bahama in a sexy cocktail of pheromones all aimed at a brief attempt to stave off another random wild orgy of nature. It’d be like trying to stop hundreds of thousands of frat boys from unleashing themselves on a city by covering the entire place in cheap beer.

So this little bugger on my shirt humps away. His tiny mind filled with nature’s one primal sex law: to have his cake, eat it, and try for every cake there ever was in the miniscule brief moments left of his existence on this world. Many wonder whether meddling humans are any different, but recent studies have shown that chicks in little shirts attract little men in big shirts, begging further study of our likenesses to other creatures of nature…like the lemming.

Attacked
It could be my shirt, an outdoor ashtray glistening with soggy cigarette butts in the early morning sun, small children, small dogs, and very possibly your wife, but now that we all smell like hot, sexy female Apple Moths we will be unable to defend against the masculine nature of these fat, horny bugs. They’ll hump our cars like tiny mice to an elephant, savagely tearing at nothing. We’ll have no choice as millions of these horny male Light Brown Apple Moths come swooping out of the sky in eager intent to procreate. We should all thank The California Department of Food and Agriculture for this opportunity to be humped like crazy. It is quite possibly all the action some of us will see for a very long time.